Once again, I'm afraid that I haven't been filing at all regularly. This is the year – apparently – of looking after myself and so working in the evenings when I've already worked all day has been placed off limits. Because it can make me a little bit ragged. But here I am with a nice empty run of moments: the sun is shining but not too hotly, somewhere in the garden there is at least one newt and it's nowhere near evening. So. Let's think about words – the things which allow me to address you in my absence and hopefully to say something of use, if not also beauty. They may even be able to suggest that, although you are not me and vice versa, we have a good deal in common – including the very human tendency to think that those who are not us are in some way … well, at least a little less interesting than we are, maybe slightly less jam-packed with the wonders we ourselves contain. (Forgive me for assuming that you are as spiritually stunted and unimaginative as I am. I do at least hope I can improve through time – you may not need to.)

It's difficult to say how deeply words run in us. They shape our worlds and our minds and our behaviour, either consciously, or covertly. And they are freighted with personal resonance. I can't hear the word mushroom without thinking of my grandmother who always pronounced it mush-ah-room. I never knew why. She wasn't an enthusiastic or even very active cook – my grandfather was the one to conjure up the Sunday dinner and the best toast I've ever eaten – and I don't recall her ever having served a mushroom, let alone (somehow the complimentary rhythms suggested this should happen) a mush-ah-room casserole. When my mother and I are together and making a meal we still use the term mush-ah-room because it is nostalgic and cheering and adds something to an occasionally rather insubstantial ingredient. It may not be coincidental that we both cook with them quite often. And that addition of glamour and interest to an often pallid and potentially fatal fungus may have been my grandmother's aim – she could be a little theatrical when she wanted.

Granny is also why I tend to call digestive biscuits – which sound gruelling and medical – suggestive biscuits – which sound as if they are capable of combining the best of two potentially delightful worlds. The suggestive/digestive substitution seems fairly common in people of an age to remember when digestives were one of the more interesting items available to have with your limp, tan-coloured coffee or stewed, oily tea. And I have to say that I am disposed to like people who spontaneously designate biscuits suggestive. Someone who is willing to be silly and who listens to the music of things is often good company.

And it's a lovely word in and of itself – suggestive. It does exactly what it should, softly and warmly in the mouth and with perhaps a more than averagely active tongue.

There were many words I loved very early on because they had a palpable effect when pronounced. Amphibian, for example, is a wonderful package of sound and meaning. I found it slightly difficult to navigate when I first met it and so I had to practice it a lot, while having it explained and looking forward to meeting animals that were both of the land and of the water. I was a bit haphazard in both.

As I child, I loved words that defined and gave structure, particularly in liminal areas. I wasn't aware that life could operate randomly, swiftly and unpleasantly around me despite very clear definitions having been set in place. I might, for example, be startled by a newt while out walking next week and fall on to an abandoned metal spike which horribly damages my brain and kills me, despite my brain holding all kinds of interesting facts about walking, spikes and newts.

I also wasn't aware until I was in my teens that reality could become much more troublesome and dangerous when human beings interfered with the words used to describe it. Currently health, a gently forceful and straightforward word for something extremely precious, is often portrayed as a laughable inconvenience for busy and sensible people. Just as safety is a ridiculous concept which no right minded democrat would go anywhere near. This continually surprises me, because I tend to feel that I like to be safe and that I particularly want those I love to be safe and that I assume other people love still other people and that the majority opinion is in favour of safety, long life, contentment and health. Words are like spells, like little tests of where reality might go next. I live in a country where the three words health and safety (surely the ideal combination) have for many years been a joke, a shorthand spat out to provoke loathing, an excuse for fabricated newspaper stories and a lack of customer service. And, oddly enough, I now live in a country where life is increasingly less safe, where the provision of healthcare is not a government priority, where employers are much freer to prioritise profit over humanity and where it is assumed that people who can't afford to defend themselves with money wouldn't really mind that much if they crippled their hand at work, or they ended up eating contaminated food, or being sexually harassed, or if their child died before reaching an A&E. I love the word health and I love the promise and openness and sibilance of the word safety.

As an adult I'm aware that all kinds of pressures - political, commercial, theological – will bring power to bear against the power of words in order to shape them to this or that agenda. And I'm aware that it takes concerted effort to continue to maintain interior clarity while suffering the cognitive dissonance epidemic language deformation evokes. Sometimes meaning will be removed by circumlocution, sometimes words and phrases will be appropriated, or censored, sometimes they will begin to die for lack of belief.

I did some work recently in Berlin's Humboldt University, performing a show about words in an upper room the balcony of which overlooked Bebelplatz where the Nazis held book burnings, including the vast destruction of 20,000 books on 10 May 1933. It's a very powerful act, to burn even one book. It's a magical gesture which seeks to destroy a mind, a way of seeing, a right to speak and be heard. Of course, book burnings are often a PR disaster now, are time-consuming and expensive to arrange. It's easier to undermine meaning at the level of individual words and phrases, to rig the education lottery against those who shouldn't be audible and who shouldn't notice when their rights are recalibrated, to close libraries, to let poverty and commercial interests restrict internet access.

Austerity – it is a little hard as a word (those two T's) and the hissing the middle, it sounds like a pebble clattering and sliding along the floor of a marble room, unsympathetic. But my reading of it is influenced by my surroundings. Austerity would never have sounded cuddly – it's austere – but it was once a word that had a sort of tired pride about it, that summarised the privations of a UK which had been ruined in every way bar one by WWII. It suggested communal sacrifice. It also suggested what the sacrifice created – a functional welfare state designed to care for other people and still other people. The war's suffering really hadn't ruined everything – it allowed us to meet and see each other in the most revealing and desperate of circumstances, to understand needs that must be fulfilled, the humanity we share and the possibilities of concerted action, of intellectual and moral courage. Austerity – I liked its old undercurrents, its shared necessities. Now that it means Austerity, for you but not for me I like it much less. It becomes a short hand for a type of unkind stupidity, a wilful ruining of that one thing we had left, our compassion for each other. Compassion – now there's a word I love: complex Classical roots, a kind of kiss in it, a slight punch of intention – that's a word I'd like to hear and say more often. Onwards.

• AL Kennedy will talk about her book of essays, On Writing, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday 12 August